Violent video games back in Newtown focus

posted at 9:21 am on February 19, 2013 by Ed Morrissey

News reports yesterday about the Newtown shooting in December brought video games back into the spotlight. The shooter, Adam Lanza, had collected “a trove” of violent video games, mainly first-person shooters that required kill shots in order to score points and advance through the levels of the game:

Police investigating the Newtown school killings have been looking into the possibility that gunman Adam Lanza may have been copying a video game as killed 26 people in the massacre.

Two months after the horror at Sandy Hook Elementary School, little remains known about Lanza’s motive.

Before the killings, he had smashed his hard drive, making his online trail and habits impossible to follow, but police did reportedly find thousands of dollars worth of violent video games.

It is believed that Lanza played the games, which included the Call of Duty series, for hours on end.

Does that level of playing such games mean teens and young adults are about to become mass murderers? CBS News threw a dash of cold water on that idea last night, emphasis mine:

Dr. Christopher Ferguson, department chair of psychology and communications at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, says he has not come across any link between playing violent video games and likelihood for violent behavior.

Ferguson, who presented for Biden’s task force in January, said many people understand at this point that most people who play violent video games won’t become violent themselves and that there is a mental health component at play. That’s different from after Columbine, he said, when many questions were raised about video games as motivations for violence. However, his studies, which have looked at people with mental health issues, including those prone to bullying violence, have found no added risk.

“We can’t find any evidence that those kids are affected either,” Ferguson told CBSNews.com, referring to children with mental health problems.

Ferguson argues that youth violence has been at a 40-year low, while violent video games remain popular. He finds it interesting how in the wake of Sandy Hook, video games have gotten a lot of blame, but when high-profile shootings involve older adults — like 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes, who shot a bus driver then kidnapped a 5-year-old and kept him in a bunker for days, or 62-year-old William Spengler, who allegedly shot and killed two first responders and injured two more firefighters in December after strangling his sister — people don’t look for similar sources to blame.

What don’t these cases have in common? Violent video games — and that’s a good thing, because millions of people play them without becoming berserkers. What do they have in common? Mental health issues, whether manifested “at play” (obviously not the meaning CBS assigned to that phrase, but noteworthy nonetheless) or elsewhere. As CBS’ John Miller reports, the mental-health component in the Newtown case was obvious even before the shooting, and had little to do with either the games or the guns. It had to do with a mentally-ill young adult and a broken home, and some very clear warning signs that either got missed or ignored:

Before we begin attacking the First or Second Amendments in a rush to avoid the next act of unpredictable violence, let’s wait until we know what the problems actually are.

Before we begin attacking the First or Second Amendments in a rush to avoid the next act of unpredictable violence, let’s wait until we know what the problems actually are.

Define the problem: Liberalism, where “thoughtful” legislation, unsubstantiated by empirical data, unfunded and unwanted by the majority of its law abiding, productive citizens, must be written in an effort to demonstrate “we did something”. (See Obamacare, Guns, War on Poverty, Dept of Ed.,Head Start, “Green” programs, Fannie Mae, Job Stimulus, etc).

Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass-shooter said specifically that he used Call of Duty multi-player to “train”. He played hundreds of hours. I’m not saying there is a correlation and I love FPSs. But some people with fantasies of carnage do have an outlet in some of these games.

If planning, stalking, and then raping women including explicit rape scenes took the place of violent murders in these video games, and then the incidence of such rapes by young white kids who played these games went up, then I suspect we’d hear about it from various women’s groups.

I love reading about “violent video games” in the media. I’d like to point out your average journalist has no more understanding of video games than they do of firearms. I’m surprised they haven’t started calling them Assault Video Games or some such nonsense.

But clearly this woman must of been mother of the year. For the life of me I don’t know why you would let a kid who is incapable of normal interaction with other people spend most of his time playing call of duty (assuming any of the video game reporting is accurate).

I’m not into video games (being as I’m over the mental age of 15), but I remember when Dungeons and Dragons was to blame for kids killing other kids (and I played D &D at the time, but somehow refrained from murder with a sword – or anything else) and heavy metal music (likely Satanic – oh, no!) was to blame for kids committing suicide.

This latest round “blame the video games” and “blame the guns” also has the intellectual depth of a kiddie pool, just like the “blame the music” and “blame D & D” mantras from the 80s/90s.

Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass-shooter said specifically that he used Call of Duty multi-player to “train”. He played hundreds of hours. I’m not saying there is a correlation and I love FPSs. But some people with fantasies of carnage do have an outlet in some of these games.

JasperBallbaggins on February 19, 2013 at 9:31 AM

Somewhaere in todays news it is being said that Lanza had used Breivik’s kill total as his mark. That is to say, he wanted to top that total. And that he purposely went to a school in that it would have the largest number of unprotected people.
Pretty sick person.

I’d bet that every single one of these shooters watched Sesame Street as young children. Maybe it’s Big Bird’s fault. Perhaps we should be banning all muppet-related content from the airwaves.
If banning Elmo keeps just one child safe, it is worth it.

Seriously, any legitimate discussion is an ongoing and long process not a photo-op committee headed up by the VP and consisting entirely of gun-hating groups like the Brady crowd. How can you talk about reasonable solutions to gun-related violence when you don’t call Rham Emanuel, Dave Bing, or Mitch Landrieu in to explain who their cities continually have so many gun-related deaths by individuals who do not have mental health issues or spend hours playing Call to Duty? The answer, of course, is uncomfortable for the politically correct.

It’s already been established that Adam Lanza’s mother was begging the state for help, could not get the help she sought, and that it was because of this that Adam Lanza went on his shooting spree. To be adding “video games” into the reportage mixing just strikes me as all kinds of wrong now.

It had to do with a mentally-ill young adult and a broken home, and some very clear warning signs that either got missed or ignored:

Brevik was also the product of a broken home. His father left when he was young, and had little contact with him. IIRC, Brevik’s father was located in France with his bimbo third wife. Dad said something like how he couldn’t imagine his cut little toddler doing such a thing.

Folks, do not get all upset and agitated because liberals are blaming violent video games… They are only fighting themselves because the violent video game makers are almost all liberals… Hence, stand on the side and watch happily how liberals are fighting each others… The same goes when the lunatics of Occupy Wall Street are raging against Wall Street bankers who are mostly limousine liberals… Let them hate each others and destroy each others… It is very good for America…

It’s already been established that Adam Lanza’s mother was begging the state for help, could not get the help she sought, and that it was because of this that Adam Lanza went on his shooting spree. To be adding “video games” into the reportage mixing just strikes me as all kinds of wrong now.

gryphon202 on February 19, 2013 at 9:44 AM

I doubt that CBS will mention that a law to make it simpler to commit potentially dangerous mentally ill people was defeated in the CT legislature, with the help of the ACLU.

Oh come on, I love reading the always-salacious Daily Mail but they get so much wrong in that article that I wonder if they got it from CBS entirely or just used the CBS reporting as a jumping-off-point. I live in CT and while I acknowledge that the Hartford Courant is a horrible rag, they are making the connection to Andres Breivik as of today.

Funny. I played tons of Doom and Wolfenstein in high school. Never had the urge to shoot up a place. Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter didn’t cause me to pick fights. And despite plenty of the Super Mario series over the years, I managed to avoid doing shrooms(except on pizza).

I don’t blame video games for these mass killings (do we blame long Mario Kart sessions for poor driving?), but I do think the entertainment industry ought to be more accountable for what they’re putting out there.

Funny. I played tons of Doom and Wolfenstein in high school. Never had the urge to shoot up a place. Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter didn’t cause me to pick fights. And despite plenty of the Super Mario series over the years, I managed to avoid doing shrooms(except on pizza).

Actually, the aftermath of broken homes from the scourge of no fault divorce probably has the highest correlation of anything. ANd of course as we all know that means exactly nothing.

Zomcon JEM on February 19, 2013 at 10:00 AM

Well, you’ve hit on about the only thing surrounding the Newtown shooting that there wasn’t already a law banning. The shooter’s weapons were stolen, he was trespassing on school grounds and he had weapons in a gun-free zone, murder is illegal unless you’re on the President’s list of Americans to be killed.

Let’s ban divorce because if it saves just one child then it is worth it. /

My expectation for a social misfit teenage boy would be to entertain himself and that today means video games. I don’t mind talking about it but I always question when it comes to human behavior “what came first the chicken or egg”. In other words if someone is starting to become a pathological killer what are the odds they aren’t going to start playing video games independent of them becoming a killer. I first thought this when feminists started linking Playboy to rape. I mean what person would leap to rape and avoid looking at naked pictures of women, lets face it a much broader and common thing that doesn’t indicate sexual violence in most men. Same for beer and pot leading to heroin, what heroin user is going to skip beer and pot and go to heroin. I am not a great believer in the gateway theory.

I don’t blame video games for these mass killings (do we blame long Mario Kart sessions for poor driving?), but I do think the entertainment industry ought to be more accountable for what they’re putting out there.

changer1701 on February 19, 2013 at 10:00 AM

What do you mean by “accountable?” Accountable to whom and for what? Not every video game is suitable for every person of every age. The industry is supposed to police that? How?

If anything, we need to return to more stringent guidance (read laws and regulation) as to what the acceptable standards are and let them work within those standards. Put another way, don’t blame the industry for producing Grand Theft Auto (when they can) but blame a society that is okay with such a “game.”

The real elephant in the room is divorce, broken homes, and absent fathers. Neither liberals nor conservatives want to talk about that.

I was having lunch yesterday with friends and my 15-year-old daughter told us that yet another of her friends’ parents are divorcing, after 16 years of marriage and two kids. This is the fifth divorce in 8 years in her fairly small circle of friends. All of the kids have been devastated, some of them have ended up in therapy, using drugs, having sex at early ages, fighting, cutting themselves. And this is in an upscale suburban area. One of my older son’s friends endured such a bitter divorce that his parents nearly killed each other, both of them are absolute narcissistic jerks and their kids have suffered enormously. I could definitely see that kid becoming a mass murderer someday, he is so so angry at the world.

Drugs, alcohol, and ultra-violent games are what these kids are using to self-medicate and escape their sense of abandonment. They are not mentally ill, they are victims of bad parents and broken homes. I think kids whose parents divorce when they are teens are especially prone to rage and hostility to the world. Little ones lose their memory of the marriage and the happier times, but teens feel that something very real and important has been taken away from them and they feel powerless to regain their happiness. I have spent way too much time around these teens and it fills me with sadness sometimes.

Same for beer and pot leading to heroin, what heroin user is going to skip beer and pot and go to heroin. I am not a great believer in the gateway theory.

Conan on February 19, 2013 at 10:11 AM

You seem to contradict yourself. The gateway theory is that pot use leads to stronger drugs like heroin, not the other way around. This is the whole justification potheads use for the legalization of weed.

To your larger point, I think there is some cause to link tendencies with opportunity. One may not be a rapist after getting access to porn but it desensitizes the “reader” to normal views on sexuality. Same goes for the constant views of violence in games, on television, in movies, etc. Such activities may not cause a killer but it normalizes violent behavior.

Yeah, well, I want to see the list of games. I want to decide whether it is “a trove”, whether it is mainly first-person shooters, and whether it’s value is thousands of dollars. Reportedly doesn’t cut it with me anymore.

Liberals………any port in the storm eh? All boiling down to government knows best.
I was doing a little reading on Newton and it got creepy real fast and I quit. Seems to me that there is much information known on the Newton story but not released.
What is released is video games and, of course guns.
But then again, what a weird group of stories, Libs in CO think women should just be sitting ducks for rape, libs in WA think that police should come into your house and inspect once a year and Newton just happened, just happened because a video game addict snapped.
Wow, thank goodness liberals are so smart and can keep us safe in the simplest of terms/

Yeah, well, I want to see the list of games. I want to decide whether it is “a trove”, whether it is mainly first-person shooters, and whether it’s value is thousands of dollars. Reportedly doesn’t cut it with me anymore.

Dusty on February 19, 2013 at 10:35 AM

I don’t know why reportedly doesn’t cut it with you anymore. After all, that AR-15 that is the focus of the gun-haters reportedly doesn’t exist, was in the car outside the school, or the primary weapon in the Sandy Hook shootings. Why would that give you pause about media integrity? /

In one of the articles the police stated as evidence that Lanza was inspired by video games that he “changed magazines of his weapons more frequently than was necessary,” and yet politicians still believe banning “high capacity” magazines will lower murder rates.

What a bunch of fracking nonsense. Millions of people play video games that are violent in nature, and also have access to all kinds of cool weaponry, myself included, but they aren’t playing shoot up the mall for real.

There are sick people in this world. Misunderstanding their illness is what leads to their violence, not video games, and certainly not guns.

Video gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. Many of them are rated M for mature, meaning that they have pretty graphic violence or other adult themes. If it were really true that playing violent video games led to violence then our high schools would resemble the killing fields of Halo or Resistance Fall of Man considering how many high school boys play them.

I can hardly wait to ask my son about the satanic messages in Minecraft though. He and two of his buddies created the world of Beowolf as a project for their senior English class. I’ll have to ask him if he will print out some of his Power Point slides of the presentation they did so I can turn them upside-down and check for satanic messages. I can hardly wait to see the look on his face.

I bet he spent more time being surrounded by Democrats than he spent playing video games. In fact, I bet he was subjected to Belly-of-the-Beast Coast Democrat insanity 100% of his life, which is enough to turn even a saint into a homicidal maniac.

Extreme resistance to governmental taxation and authority is derived, according to Freud’s theory of anal characterology, from premature and harshly coercive toilet training, in which a child is forced unfairly and against its will to surrender the products of his eliminations (which represent money, among other things, in the unconscious) to parental authority. Among these individuals anal eroticism plays a significant role in the psychogenesis of paranoia and conspiracy theorizing, which may represent a defense mechanism erected against repressed fears of passive submission.
PMID: 21553677
[PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

She was the only one trying to get any help for the kid. (Perhaps she had an idea from things he said of what he wanted to do) She wanted to have him committed so that he could get full-time treatment.

And the state stopped her from doing that…with the gleeful participation and assistance of the ACLU.

Extreme resistance to governmental taxation and authority is derived, according to Freud’s theory of anal characterology, from premature and harshly coercive toilet training, in which a child is forced unfairly and against its will to surrender the products of his eliminations (which represent money, among other things, in the unconscious) to parental authority. Among these individuals anal eroticism plays a significant role in the psychogenesis of paranoia and conspiracy theorizing, which may represent a defense mechanism erected against repressed fears of passive submission.
PMID: 21553677
[PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]

J_Crater on February 19, 2013 at 11:41 AM

Well, there you have it. All the left needs now is a famous crackpot psychologist to declare the desire to own a firearm a mental illness. (Don’t think they aren’t working on it.)

Its always violence, guns, games – with some bizarre 6th degrees to conservatives – rinse and repeat.

Sort of like Dr Drew sitting back and giving interviews – being his 5th “patient” has died from his TV show.

Now, do you think people on the fringe of what was some sort of celebrity career – being thrown on TV for millions to see their failure and addiction might have a cause and effect, leading to death?

Sort of like teachers – who are the “first notifiers” for a kid to be put on psychotropic drugs – end up blaming everything and anything – instead of the fact they, as non licensed Dr’s – recommended drugs because Johnny cant keep still. That immense 20 year rise of Ritalin really panned out…

Feelings, talking and exposure are always the solution, even when they aren’t.

Appearing on a Chicago Sunday morning talk show, [Chicago Police] superintendent Garry McCarthy expressed his conviction that firearm owners who lobby their elected representatives or who donate money to political campaigns are engaged in corruption that endangers public safety. McCarthy went on to express his belief that judges and legislators should rely on public opinion polls when interpreting our Constitution.After totally dismissing the citizen’s right to redress grievances, McCarthy trained his constitutional wisdom on the 2nd Amendment. Despite recent court decisions to the contrary, McCarthy opined that the 2nd Amendment limits citizens to owning smooth-bore muskets. McCarthy went on to say that he believes that the 2nd Amendment supports mandatory liability insurance for firearm owners and the mandatory application of GPS tracking devices to civilian owned firearms.

Advertisers spend billions of dollars every year on the notion that repeated exposure to fictitious scenarios (commercials) will affect people’s behavior (make them buy products). They are also well aware that the forces often work subconsciously and on a person’s impulses. It follows that playing a fictitious game like Call of Duty, which is in effect a killing simulator, could have the affect of desensitizing a young person, or a delicate mind, to the reality, and true consequences of killing. Indeed, one can kill hundreds of fictitious enemies in one sitting with the game. It also intrinsically links the notion of “fun” with killing.

If you subscribe to the notion that “you become what you pay attention to”, or “you are what you think” then the repeated simulation of killing, made to seem real with enhanced 3-D graphics, sound, gore etc., then it seems logical that it could, in some cases, cause a person to be more likely to act out on a violent impulse.